There is now only a week to go before midterm
congressional elections in the United States. The
legislative outcome is already fairly clear. President
George W. Bush lost the ability to drive legislation
through Congress when he had to back away from his
Social Security proposals. That situation will
continue: The president will not be able to generate
legislation without building coalitions. On the other
hand, Congress will not be able to override his
vetoes. That means that, regardless of whether the
Democrats take the House of Representatives (as
appears likely) or the Senate (which appears less
likely but still possible), the basic architecture of
the American legislative process will remain intact.
Democrats will not gain much power to legislate;
Republicans will not lose much.

If the Democrats take control of the House from the
Republicans, the most important change will not be
that Nancy Pelosi becomes House Speaker, but that the
leadership of House committees will shift -- and even
more significant, that there will be upheaval of
committee staffs. Republicans will shift to minority
staff positions -- and have to let go of a lot of
staffers -- while the Democrats will get to hire a lot
of new ones. These staffers serve two functions. The
first is preparing legislation, the second is managing
investigations. Given the likelihood of political
gridlock, there will be precious little opportunity
for legislation to be signed into law during the next
two years -- but there likely will be ample
opportunity and motivation for congressional
investigations.

Should the Democrats use this power to their
advantage, there will be long-term implications for
both the next presidential election and foreign policy
options in the interim.

One of the most important things that the Republicans
achieved, with their control of both the House and
Senate, was to establish control over the type and
scope of investigations that were permitted. Now, even
if control of only the House should change hands, the
Democrats will be making those decisions. And, where
the GOP's goal was to shut down congressional
investigations, the Democrat Party's goal will be to
open them up and use them to shape the political
landscape ahead of the 2008 presidential election.

It is important to define what we mean by
"investigation." On the surface, congressional
investigations are opportunities for staffers from the
majority party to wield subpoena power in efforts to
embarrass their bosses' opponents. The investigations
also provide opportunities for members of Congress and
senators to make extensive speeches that witnesses
have to sit and listen to when they are called to
testify -- a very weird process, if you have ever seen
it. Congressional investigations are not about coming
to the truth of a matter in order for the laws of the
republic to be improved for the common good. They are
designed to extract political benefit and put
opponents in the wrong. (Republicans and Democrats
alike use the congressional investigative function to
that end, so neither has the right to be indignant.)

For years, however, Democrats have been in no position
to unilaterally call hearings and turn their staffs
and subpoena powers loose on a topic -- which means
they have been precluded from controlling the news
cycle. The media focus intensely on major
congressional hearings. For television networks, they
provide vivid moments of confrontation; and the reams
of testimony, leaked or official, give the print media
an enormous opportunity to look for embarrassing
moments that appear to reveal something newsworthy. In
the course of these hearings, there might even be
opportunities for witnesses to fall into acts of
perjury -- or truth-telling -- that can lead to
indictments and trials.

To reverse their position, the Democrats need not
capture both the House and Senate next week. In fact,
from the party's standpoint, that might not even be
desirable. The Senate and House historically have
gotten in each other's way in the hearing process.
Moreover, there are a lot of Democratic senators
considering a run for the presidency, but not many
members of Congress with those ambitions. Senators who
get caught up in congressional hearings can wind up
being embarrassed themselves -- and with the competing
goals of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and some of the
other candidates, things could wind up a mess. But if
the House alone goes to Democrats, Pelosi would be
positioned to orchestrate a series of hearings from
multiple committees and effectively control the news
cycles. Within three months of the new House being
sworn in, the political landscape could be dominated
by hearings -- each week bringing new images of
witnesses being skewered or news of embarrassing files
being released. Against this backdrop, a new
generation of Democratic congressmen would be making
their debuts on the news networks, both while sitting
on panels, and on the news channels afterward.

Politically, this would have two implications. First,
the ability of the White House to control and direct
public attention would decline dramatically. Not only
would the White House not be able to shut down
unwanted debate, but it would lack the ability even to
take part in setting the agenda. Each week's subject
would be chosen by the House Democratic leadership.
Second, there will be a presidential election in two
years that the Democrats want to win. Therefore, they
would use congressional hearings to shape public
opinion along the lines their party wants. The goal
would be not only to embarrass the administration, but
also to showcase Democratic strengths.

The Senate can decide to hold its own hearings, of
course, and likely would if left in Republican hands.
The problem is that, at the end of the day, the most
interesting investigations would involve the Bush
administration and corporations that can be linked to
it. A GOP-controlled Senate could call useful
hearings, but they would be overwhelmed by the
Democratic fireworks. They just would not matter as
much.

So let's consider, from a foreign policy standpoint,
what would be likely matters for investigation:

* What did the Bush administration really know
about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Did Bush
dismiss advice from the CIA on Iraq?

* Did the administration ignore warnings about al
Qaeda attacks prior to 9/11?

These, of course, would be the mothers of all
investigations. Everything would be dragged out and
pored over. The fact that there have been bipartisan
examinations by the 9/11 commission would not matter:
The new hearings would be framed as an inquiry into
whether the 9/11 commission's recommendations were
implemented -- and that would open the door to
re-examine all the other issues.

Following close on these would be investigations into:

* Whether the Department of Homeland Security is
effective.

* Whether the new structure of the intelligence
community works.

* Whether Halliburton received contracts unfairly
-- a line of inquiry that could touch Vice President
Dick Cheney.

* Whether the Geneva Conventions should apply in
cases of terrorist detentions.

* Whether China is violating international trade
agreement.

And so on. Every scab would be opened -- as is the
right of Congress, the tendency of the nation in
unpopular wars, and likely an inevitable consequence
of these midterm elections.

We can expect the charges raised at these hearings to
be serious, and to come from two groups. The first
will be Democratic critics of the administration.
These will be unimportant: Such critics, along with
people like former White House security adviser
Richard Clarke, already have said everything they have
to say. But the second group will include another
class -- former members of the administration, the
military and the CIA who have, since the invasion of
Iraq, broken with the administration. They have
occasionally raised their voices -- as, for instance,
in Bob Woodward's recent book -- but the new
congressional hearings would provide a platform for
systematic criticism of the administration. And many
of these critics seem bruised and bitter enough to
avail themselves of it.

This intersects with internal Republican politics. At
this point, the Republicans are divided into two
camps. There are those who align with the Bush
position: that the war in Iraq made sense and that,
despite mistakes, it has been prosecuted fairly well
on the whole. And there are those, coalesced around
Sens. Chuck Hagel and John Warner, who argue that,
though the rationale for the war very well might have
made sense, its prosecution by Donald Rumsfeld has led
to disaster. The lines might be evenly drawn, but for
the strong suspicion that Sen. John McCain is in the
latter camp.

McCain clearly intends to run for president and,
though he publicly shows support for Bush, there is
every evidence that McCain has never forgiven him for
the treatment he received in the primaries of 2000.
McCain is not going to attack the president, nor does
he really oppose the war in Iraq, but he has shown
signs that he feels that the war has not been well
prosecuted. This view, shared publicly by recently
retired military commanders who served in Iraq, holds
out Rumsfeld as the villain. It is not something that
McCain is going to lead the charge on, but in taking
down Rumsfeld, McCain would be positioned to say that
he supported the war and the president -- but not his
secretary of defense, who was responsible for
overseeing the prosecution of the war.

From McCain's point of view, little would be more
perfect than an investigation into the war by a
Democrat-controlled House during which former military
and Defense Department officials pounded the daylights
out of Rumsfeld. This would put whole-hearted
Republican supporters of the president in a tough
position and give McCain -- who, as a senator, would
not have to participate in the hearings -- space to
defend Bush's decision but not his tactics. The
hearings also would allow him to challenge Democratic
front-runners (Clinton and Obama) on their credentials
for waging a war. They could be maneuvered into either
going too far and taking a pure anti-war stance, or
into trying to craft a defense policy at which McCain
could strike. To put it another way, aggressively
investigating an issue like the war could wind up
blowing up in the Democrats' faces, but that is so
distant and subtle a possibility that we won't worry
about it happening -- nor will they.

What does seem certain, however, is this: The American
interest in foreign policy is about to take an
investigatory turn, as in the waning days of the
Vietnam War. Various congressional hearings, like
those of the Church Committee, so riveted the United
States in the 1970s and so tied down the policymaking
bureaucracy that crafting foreign policy became almost
impossible.

George W. Bush is a lame duck in the worst sense of
the term. Not only are there no more elections he can
influence, but he is heading into his last two years
in office with terrible poll ratings. And he is likely
to lose control of the House of Representatives -- a
loss that will generate endless hearings and
investigations on foreign policy, placing Bush and his
staff on the defensive for two years. Making foreign
policy in this environment will be impossible.

Following the elections, five or six months will
elapse before the House Democrats get organized and
have staff in place. After that, the avalanche will
fall in on Bush, and 2008 presidential politics will
converge with congressional investigations to
overwhelm his ability to manage foreign policy. That
means the president has less than half a year to get
his house in order if he hopes to control the
situation, or at least to manage his response.

Meanwhile, the international window of opportunity for
U.S. enemies will open wider and wider.